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For all the pre-release speculation about how analog epic-maker Christopher Nolan's "Oppenheimer" would re-create the explosion of the first atomic bomb, the film's most spectacular attraction turns out to be something else: the human face. 

This three-plus hour biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer ( Cillian Murphy ) is a film about faces. They talk, a lot. They listen. They react to good and bad news. And sometimes they get lost in their own heads—none more so than the title character, the supervisor of the nuclear weapons team at Los Alamos whose apocalyptic contribution to science earned him the nickname The American Prometheus (as per the title of Nolan's primary source, the biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherman). Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema use the large-format IMAX film system not merely to capture the splendor of New Mexico's desert panoramas but contrast the external coolness and internal turmoil of Oppenheimer, a brilliant mathematician and low-key showman and leader whose impulsive nature and insatiable sexual appetites made his private life a disaster, and whose greatest contribution to civilization was a weapon that could destroy it. Close-up after close-up shows star Cillian Murphy's face staring into the middle distance, off-screen, and sometimes directly into the lens, while Oppenheimer dissociates from unpleasant interactions, or gets lost inside memories, fantasies, and waking nightmares. "Oppenheimer" rediscovers the power of huge closeups of people's faces as they grapple with who they are, and who other people have decided that they are, and what they've done to themselves and others. 

Sometimes the close-ups of people's faces are interrupted by flash-cuts of events that haven't happened, or already happened. There are recurring images of flame, debris, and smaller chain-reaction explosions that resemble strings of firecrackers, as well as non-incendiary images that evoke other awful, personal disasters. (There are a lot of gradually expanding flashbacks in this film, where you see a glimpse of something first, then a bit more of it, and then finally the entire thing.) But these don't just relate to the big bomb that Oppenheimer's team hopes to detonate in the desert, or the little ones that are constantly detonating in Oppenheimer's life, sometimes because he personally pushed the big red button in a moment of anger, pride or lust, and other times because he made a naive or thoughtless mistake that pissed somebody off long ago, and the wronged person retaliated with the equivalent of a time-delayed bomb. The "fissile" cutting, to borrow a physics word, is also a metaphor for the domino effect caused by individual decisions, and the chain reaction that makes other things happen as a result. This principle is also visualized by repeated images of ripples in water, starting with the opening closeup of raindrops setting off expanding circles on the surface that foreshadow both the ending of Oppenheimer's career as a government advisor and public figure and the explosion of the first nuke at Los Alamos (which observers see, then hear, then finally feel, in all its awful impact). 

The weight of the film's interests and meanings are carried by faces—not just Oppenheimer's, but those of other significant characters, including General Leslie Groves ( Matt Damon ), Los Alamos' military supervisor; Robert's suffering wife Kitty Oppenheimer ( Emily Blunt ), whose tactical mind could have averted a lot of disasters if her husband would have only listened; and Lewis Strauss ( Robert Downey , Jr.), the Atomic Energy Commission chair who despised Oppenheimer for a lot of reasons, including his decision to distance himself from his Jewish roots, and who spent several years trying to derail Oppenheimer's post-Los Alamos career. The latter constitutes its own adjacent full-length story about pettiness, mediocrity, and jealousy. Strauss is Salieri to Oppenheimer's Mozart, regularly and often pathetically reminding others that he studied physics, too, back in the day, and that he's a good person, unlike Oppenheimer the adulterer and communist sympathizer. (This film asserts that Strauss leaked the FBI file on his progressive and communist associations to a third party who then wrote to the bureau's director, J. Edgar Hoover.)

The film speaks quite often of one of the principles of quantum physics, which holds that observing quantum phenomena by a detector or an instrument can change the results of this experiment. The editing illustrates it by constantly re-framing our perception of an event to change its meaning, and the script does it by adding new information that undermines, contradicts, or expands our sense of why a character did something, or whether they even knew why they did it. 

That, I believe, is really what "Oppenheimer" is about, much more so than the atom bomb itself, or even its impact on the war and the Japanese civilian population, which is talked about but never shown. The film does show what the atom bomb does to human flesh, but it's not recreations of the actual attacks on Japan: the agonized Oppenheimer imagines Americans going through it. This filmmaking decision is likely to antagonize both viewers who wanted a more direct reckoning with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and those who have bought into the arguments advanced by Strauss and others that the bombs had to be dropped because Japan never would have surrendered otherwise. The movie doesn't indicate whether it thinks that interpretation is true or if it sides more with Oppenheimer and others who insisted that Japan was on its knees by that point in World War II and would have eventually given up without atomic attacks that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. No, this is a film that permits itself the freedoms and indulgences of novelists, poets, and opera composers. It does what we expect it to do: Dramatize the life of Oppenheimer and other historically significant people in his orbit in an aesthetically daring way while also letting all of the characters and all of the events be used metaphorically and symbolically as well, so that they become pointillistic elements in a much larger canvas that's about the mysteries of the human personality and the unforeseen impact of decisions made by individuals and societies.

This is another striking thing about "Oppenheimer." It's not entirely about Oppenheimer even though Murphy's baleful face and haunting yet opaque eyes dominate the movie. It's also about the effect of Oppenheimer's personality and decisions on other people, from the other strong-willed members of his atom bomb development team (including Benny Safdie's Edwin Teller, who wanted to skip ahead to create the much more powerful hydrogen bomb, and eventually did) to the beleaguered Kitty; Oppenheimer's mistress Jean Tatlock ( Florence Pugh , who has some of Gloria Grahame's self-immolating smolder); General Groves, who likes Oppenheimer in spite of his arrogance but isn't going to side with him over the United States government; and even Harry Truman, the US president who ordered the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (played in a marvelous cameo by Gary Oldman ) and who derides Oppenheimer as a naive and narcissistic "crybaby" who sees history mainly in terms of his own feelings.

Jennifer Lame's editing is prismatic and relentless, often in a faintly Terrence Malick -y way, skipping between three or more time periods within seconds. It's wedded to virtually nonstop music by  Ludwig Göransson  that fuses with the equally relentless dialogue and monologues to create an odd but distinctive sort of scientifically expository aria that's probably what it would feel like to read American Prometheus  while listening to a playlist of  Philip Glass film scores. Non-linear movies like this one do a better job of capturing the pinball-machine motions of human consciousness than linear movies do, and they also capture what it's like to read a third-person omniscient book (or a biography that permits itself to imagine what its subjects might have been thinking or feeling). It also paradoxically captures the mental process of reading a text and responding to it emotionally and viscerally as well as intellectually. The mind stays anchored to the text. But it also jumps outside of it, connecting the text to other texts, to external knowledge, and to one's own experience and imaginings.

This review hasn't delved into the plot of the film or the real-world history that inspired it, not because it isn't important (of course it is) but because—as is always the case with Nolan—the main attraction is not the tale but the telling. Nolan has been derided as less a dramatist than half showman, half mathematician, making bombastic, overcomplicated blockbusters that are as much puzzles as stories. But whether that characterization was true (and I'm increasingly convinced it never entirely was) it seems beside the point when you see how thoughtfully and rewardingly it's been applied to a biography of a real person. "Oppenheimer" could retrospectively seem like a turning point in the director's filmography, when he takes all of the stylistic and technical practices that he'd been honing for the previous twenty years in intellectualized pulp blockbusters and turns them inward.

The movie is an academic-psychedelic biography in the vein of those 1990s Oliver Stone films that were edited within an inch of their lives (at times it's as if the park bench scene in " JFK " had been expanded to three hours). There's also a strain of pitch-black humor, in a Stanley Kubrick  mode, as when top government officials meet to go over a list of possible Japanese cities to bomb, and the man reading the list says that he just made an executive decision to delete Kyoto from it because he and his wife honeymooned there. (The Kubrick connection is cemented further by the presence of "Full Metal Jacket" star  Matthew Modine , who co-stars as American engineer and inventor Vannevar Bush.) It’s an example of top-of-the-line, studio-produced popular art with a dash of swagger, variously evoking Michael Mann's " The Insider ," late-period Terrence Malick, nonlinearly-edited art cinema touchstones like "Hiroshima Mon Amour," "The Pawnbroker," "All That Jazz" and " Picnic at Hanging Rock "; and, inevitably, " Citizen Kane " (there's even a Rosebud-like mystery surrounding what Oppenheimer and his hero Albert Einstein, played by Tom Conti , talked about on the banks of a Princeton pond). 

Most of the performances have a bit of an "old movie" feeling, with the actors snapping off their lines and not moving their faces as much as they would in a more modern story. A lot of the dialogue is delivered quickly, producing a screwball comedy energy. This comes through most strongly in the arguments between Robert and Kitty about his sexual indiscretions and refusal to listen to her mostly superb advice; the more abstract debates about power and responsibility between Robert and General Groves, and the scenes between Strauss and a Senate aide (Alden Ehrenreich) who is advising him as he testifies before a committee that he hopes will approve him to serve in President Dwight Eisenhower's cabinet.

But as a physical experience, "Oppenheimer" is something else entirely—it's hard to say exactly what, and that's what's so fascinating about it. I've already heard complaints that the movie is "too long," that it could've ended with the first bomb detonating, and could've done without the bits about Oppenheimer's sex life and the enmity of Strauss, and that it's perversely self-defeating to devote so much of the running time, including the most of the third hour, to a pair of governmental hearings: the one where Oppenheimer tries to get his security clearance renewed, and Strauss trying to get approved for Eisenhower's cabinet. But the film's furiously entropic tendencies complement the theoretical discussions of the how's and why's of the individual and collective personality. To greater and lesser degrees, all of the characters are appearing before a tribunal and bring called to account for their contradictions, hypocrisies, and sins. The tribunal is out there in the dark. We've been given the information but not told what to decide, which is as it should be.

Matt Zoller Seitz

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com, TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism.

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Oppenheimer (2023)

Rated R for some sexuality, nudity and language.

181 minutes

Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer

Emily Blunt as Katherine 'Kitty' Oppenheimer

Matt Damon as Gen. Leslie Groves Jr.

Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss

Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock

Benny Safdie as Edward Teller

Michael Angarano as Robert Serber

Josh Hartnett as Ernest Lawrence

Rami Malek as David Hill

Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr

Dane DeHaan as Kenneth Nichols

Dylan Arnold as Frank Oppenheimer

David Krumholtz as Isidor Isaac Rabi

Alden Ehrenreich as Senate Aide

Matthew Modine as Vannevar Bush

Gary Oldman as Harry S. Truman

Alex Wolff as Luis Walter Alvarez

Casey Affleck as Boris Pash

Jack Quaid as Richard Feynman

Emma Dumont as Jackie Oppenheimer

Matthias Schweighöfer as Werner Heisenberg

David Dastmalchian as William L. Borden

Christopher Denham as Klaus Fuchs

Josh Peck as Kenneth Bainbridge

Tony Goldwyn as Gordon Gray

Olivia Thirlby as Lilli Hornig

James Remar as Henry Stimson

• Christopher Nolan

Writer (based on the book by)

• Martin Sherwin

Cinematographer

• Hoyte van Hoytema
• Jennifer Lame
• Ludwig Göransson

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Oppenheimer, common sense media reviewers.

Nolan's complex A-bomb biopic has sex, swearing, violence.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

You may have the knowledge and skill to create som

Scientists are elevated to celebrity status, and t

Most characters -- historical figures from the 193

Death by suicide. Massive fiery, loud bomb explosi

Several sex scenes with partial nudity, including

Strong language includes a few uses of "f--k," plu

Frequent drinking, including by a character who's

Parents need to know that Oppenheimer is director Christopher Nolan's drama about J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), the scientist responsible for the creation of the atomic bomb. But it's less an entertaining history lesson than it is a dense examination of the unholy matrimony of quantum physics and…

Positive Messages

You may have the knowledge and skill to create something dangerously powerful -- but should you?

Positive Role Models

Scientists are elevated to celebrity status, and their brain power is aspirational -- as is their perseverance and ability to work as a team to accomplish a daunting goal.

Diverse Representations

Most characters -- historical figures from the 1930s–'50s -- are White American or European men. Oppenheimer and many of the other scientists, including Albert Einstein, are Jewish (though the main Jewish characters aren't portrayed by Jewish actors). One female scientist is featured, and other women can be spotted working in the background. The victims of the atomic bomb detonations (Japanese people, interned Japanese Americans, and Native Americans) don't have a voice in the film. A sex scene that includes White characters reading from the holy Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita has drawn complaints for being insensitive/offensive.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

Death by suicide. Massive fiery, loud bomb explosion, accompanied by a loud "doom" score that underlines the future impact of the detonation. Discussion of the impact of the atomic bomb on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In a hallucination, the skin on a woman's face appears to blow off. Attempted murder through the eyes of the protagonist.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Several sex scenes with partial nudity, including long sequences with bare breasts. Recurring infidelity.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Strong language includes a few uses of "f--k," plus "balls," "goddamn," "idiot," and "s--t."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Frequent drinking, including by a character who's portrayed as having an alcohol dependency. Smoking cigarettes and a pipe.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Oppenheimer is director Christopher Nolan 's drama about J. Robert Oppenheimer ( Cillian Murphy ), the scientist responsible for the creation of the atomic bomb. But it's less an entertaining history lesson than it is a dense examination of the unholy matrimony of quantum physics and military bureaucracy, and things can get pretty confusing thanks to frequent undated time jumps and a barrage of names and characters to keep straight. The sex scenes (Nolan's first) include frequent partial nudity (particularly co-star Florence Pugh 's breasts). Characters smoke, as would be expected in the 1930s–'50s setting, and drink. A bomb trial demonstrates the enormousness of the weapon's capabilities, with fire, noise, and smoke. But viewers are told about, rather than shown, the horror that unfolded after the bomb was ultimately dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There are references to mass assassination and to suicide, and a brief hallucination of a young woman's skin appearing to blow off. Language includes a few uses of "f--k," plus "goddamn," "s--t," and more. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (65)
• Kids say (84)

Based on 65 parent reviews

I wouldn't ever take my kids (even when they were teenagers)

What's the story.

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan , OPPENHEIMER follows brilliant scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer ( Cillian Murphy ) as he studies and masters quantum physics. As the United States enters World War II, Oppenheimer is tapped to assemble and lead a group of allied scientists to create a war-ending bomb.

Is It Any Good?

Like J. Robert Oppenheimer, Nolan is a genius -- and, also like Oppenheimer, he may be too close to his subject matter to realize that he lost the thread. It's now abundantly clear that Nolan is fascinated with World War II, but it may be hard for many viewers (even those who love history) to follow this story with ease. If you need a reference card, captions, the ability to pause and rewind the film, and Wikipedia on standby to understand what's going on, it's an issue. And if some viewers' thoughts start drifting to wondering how Aaron Sorkin , Ron Howard , or Steven Spielberg might have made this movie better, that's a big problem.

The atomic bomb is just part of the story in Oppenheimer -- the plot is actually more about whether the leader of The Manhattan Project will get his security clearance renewed a decade after the end of World War II. Really. And given that Oppenheimer apparently wasn't the greatest guy (the film softens the fact that he apparently tried to murder his teacher), it's difficult to invest or care. Nolan is beloved for creating cinematic puzzles that challenge viewers' intellect and keep us on our toes -- we may sometimes be confused, but we know it's part of the long game. Here, he tries to play that game with viewers again, but it doesn't really work in a biopic that's directed at having audiences examine the morality of innovation. Nolan seems to intend for us to question our present race into artificial intelligence, but the film only leaves us questioning him.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the real-life moral dilemma of building a weapon of mass destruction. Given the circumstances, do you think the scientists had another choice? If you create something powerful, can you be sure it won't be misused in someone else's hands -- and should that worry impede innovation?

Nolan flips between color and black-and-white cinematography as a storytelling device in Oppenheimer . What do you think that choice means?

Discuss the fears and accusations related to Communism in the 1950s. Who were the victims? How does Oppenheimer show how McCarthyism was used to target opponents? Do you see any modern parallels?

How do you think history should judge J. Robert Oppenheimer? Do you think he's depicted accurately or fairly here?

How are drinking and smoking portrayed? Is substance use glamorized? Does the historic setting affect the impact of seeing characters smoke and drink?

Movie Details

• In theaters : July 21, 2023
• On DVD or streaming : November 21, 2023
• Cast : Cillian Murphy , Emily Blunt , Matt Damon
• Director : Christopher Nolan
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Universal Pictures
• Genre : Drama
• Topics : Brothers and Sisters , History , Science and Nature
• Run time : 180 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : some sexuality, nudity and language
• Awards : Academy Award , BAFTA , Golden Globe
• Last updated : March 11, 2024

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Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Critic’s Pick

‘Oppenheimer’ Review: A Man for Our Time

Christopher Nolan’s complex, vivid portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb,” is a brilliant achievement in formal and conceptual terms.

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‘Oppenheimer’ | Anatomy of a Scene

The writer and director christopher nolan narrates the opening sequence from the film, starring cillian murphy..

Hi, I’m Christopher Nolan director, writer, and co-producer of “Oppenheimer.” Opening with the raindrops on the water came late to myself and Jen Lane in the edit suite. But ultimately, it became a motif that runs the whole way through the film. Became very important. These opening images of the detonation at Trinity are based on the real footage. Andrew Jackson, our visual effects supervisor, put them together using analog methods to try and reproduce the incredible frame rates that their technology allowed at the time, superior to what we have today. Adapting Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s book “American Prometheus,” I fully embraced the Prometheun theme, but ultimately chose to change the title to “Oppenheimer” to give a more direct idea of what the film was going to be about and whose point of view we’re seeing. And here we have Cillian Murphy with an IMAX camera inches from his nose. Hoyte van Hoytema was incredible. IMAX camera revealing everything. And I think, to some degree, applying the pressure to Cillian as Oppenheimer that this hearing was applying. “Yes, your honor.” “We’re not judges, Doctor.” “Oh.” And behind him, out of focus, the great Emily Blunt who’s going to become so important to the film as Kitty Oppenheimer, who gradually comes more into focus over the course of the first reel. We divided the two timelines into fission and fusion, the two different approaches to releasing nuclear energy in this devastating form to try and suggest to the audience the two different timelines. And then embraced black-and-white shooting here. Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss being shot on IMAX black-and-white film. The first time anyone’s ever shot that film. Made especially for us. And he’s here talking to Alden Ehrenreich who is absolutely indicative of the incredible ensemble that our casting director John Papsidera put together. Robert Downey Jr. utterly transformed, I think, not just in terms of appearance, but also in terms of approach to character, stripping away years of very well-developed charisma to just try and inhabit the skin of a somewhat awkward, sometimes venal, but also charismatic individual, and losing himself in this utterly. And then as we come up to this door, we go into the Senate hearing rooms. And we try to give that as much visibility, grandeur, and glamour to contrast with the security hearing that’s so claustrophobic. And takes Oppenheimer completely out of the limelight. [CROWD SHOUTING]

By Manohla Dargis

“Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s staggering film about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man known as “the father of the atomic bomb,” condenses a titanic shift in consciousness into three haunted hours. A drama about genius, hubris and error, both individual and collective, it brilliantly charts the turbulent life of the American theoretical physicist who helped research and develop the two atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II — cataclysms that helped usher in our human-dominated age.

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The movie is based on “ American Prometheus : The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” the authoritative 2005 biography by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Written and directed by Nolan, the film borrows liberally from the book as it surveys Oppenheimer’s life, including his role in the Manhattan Engineer District, better known as the Manhattan Project. He served as director of a clandestine weapons lab built in a near-desolate stretch of Los Alamos, in New Mexico, where he and many other of the era’s most dazzling scientific minds puzzled through how to harness nuclear reactions for the weapons that killed tens of thousands instantly, ending the war in the Pacific.

The atomic bomb and what it wrought define Oppenheimer’s legacy and also shape this film. Nolan goes deep and long on the building of the bomb, a fascinating and appalling process, but he doesn’t restage the attacks; there are no documentary images of the dead or panoramas of cities in ashes, decisions that read as his ethical absolutes. The horror of the bombings, the magnitude of the suffering they caused and the arms race that followed suffuse the film. “Oppenheimer” is a great achievement in formal and conceptual terms, and fully absorbing, but Nolan’s filmmaking is, crucially, in service to the history that it relates.

The story tracks Oppenheimer — played with feverish intensity by Cillian Murphy — across decades, starting in the 1920s with him as a young adult and continuing until his hair grays. The film touches on personal and professional milestones, including his work on the bomb, the controversies that dogged him, the anti-Communist attacks that nearly ruined him, as well as the friendships and romances that helped sustain yet also troubled him. He has an affair with a political firebrand named Jean Tatlock (a vibrant Florence Pugh), and later weds a seductive boozer, Kitty Harrison (Emily Blunt, in a slow-building turn), who accompanies him to Los Alamos, where she gives birth to their second child.

It’s a dense, event-filled story that Nolan — who’s long embraced the plasticity of the film medium — has given a complex structure, which he parcels into revealing sections. Most are in lush color; others in high-contrast black and white. These sections are arranged in strands that wind together for a shape that brings to mind the double helix of DNA. To signal his conceit, he stamps the film with the words “fission” (a splitting into parts) and “fusion” (a merging of elements); Nolan being Nolan, he further complicates the film by recurrently kinking up the overarching chronology — it is a lot.

It also isn’t a story that builds gradually; rather, Nolan abruptly tosses you into the whirl of Oppenheimer’s life with vivid scenes of him during different periods. In rapid succession the watchful older Oppie (as his intimates call him) and his younger counterpart flicker onscreen before the story briefly lands in the 1920s, where he’s an anguished student tormented by fiery, apocalyptic visions. He suffers; he also reads T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” drops a needle on Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” and stands before a Picasso painting, defining works of an age in which physics folded space and time into space-time .

This fast pace and narrative fragmentation continue as Nolan fills in this Cubistic portrait, crosses and recrosses continents and ushers in armies of characters, including Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), a physicist who played a role in the Manhattan Project. Nolan has loaded the movie with familiar faces — Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Gary Oldman — some distracting. It took me a while to accept the director Benny Safdie as Edward Teller, the theoretical physicist known as the “father of the hydrogen bomb,” and I still don’t know why Rami Malek shows up in a minor part other than he’s yet another known commodity.

As Oppenheimer comes into focus so does the world. In 1920s Germany, he learns quantum physics; the next decade he’s at Berkeley teaching, bouncing off other young geniuses and building a center for the study of quantum physics. Nolan makes the era’s intellectual excitement palpable — Einstein published his theory of general relativity in 1915 — and, as you would expect, there’s a great deal of scientific debate and chalkboards filled with mystifying calculations, most of which Nolan translates fairly comprehensibly. One of the film’s pleasures is experiencing by proxy the kinetic excitement of intellectual discourse.

It’s at Berkeley that the trajectory of Oppenheimer’s life dramatically shifts, after news breaks that Germany has invaded Poland. By that point, he has become friends with Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), a physicist who invented a particle accelerator, the cyclotron , and who plays an instrumental role in the Manhattan Project. It’s also at Berkeley that Oppenheimer meets the project’s military head, Leslie Groves (a predictably good Damon), who makes him Los Alamos’s director, despite the leftist causes he supported — among them, the fight against fascism during the Spanish Civil War — and some of his associations, including with Communist Party members like his brother, Frank (Dylan Arnold).

Nolan is one of the few contemporary filmmakers operating at this ambitious scale, both thematically and technically. Working with his superb cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, Nolan has shot in 65-millimeter film (which is projected in 70-millimeter), a format that he’s used before to create a sense of cinematic monumentality. The results can be immersive, though at times clobbering, particularly when the wow of his spectacle has proved more substantial and coherent than his storytelling. In “Oppenheimer,” though, as in “ Dunkirk ” (2017), he uses the format to convey the magnitude of a world-defining event; here, it also closes the distance between you and Oppenheimer, whose face becomes both vista and mirror.

The film’s virtuosity is evident in every frame, but this is virtuosity without self-aggrandizement. Big subjects can turn even well-intended filmmakers into show-offs, to the point that they upstage the history they seek to do justice to. Nolan avoids that trap by insistently putting Oppenheimer into a larger context, notably with the black-and-white portions. One section turns on a politically motivated security clearance hearing in 1954, a witch hunt that damaged his reputation; the second follows the 1959 confirmation for Lewis Strauss (a mesmerizing, near-unrecognizable Downey), a former chairman of the United States Atomic Energy Commission who was nominated for a cabinet position.

Nolan integrates these black-and-white sections with the color ones, using scenes from the hearing and the confirmation — Strauss’s role in the hearing and his relationship with Oppenheimer directly affected the confirmation’s outcome — to create a dialectical synthesis. One of the most effective examples of this approach illuminates how Oppenheimer and other Jewish project scientists, some of whom were refugees from Nazi Germany, saw their work in stark, existential terms. Yet Oppenheimer’s genius, his credentials, international reputation and wartime service to the United States government cannot save him from political gamesmanship, the vanity of petty men and the naked antisemitism of the Red scare.

These black-and-white sequences define the last third of “Oppenheimer.” They can seem overlong, and at times in this part of the film it feels as if Nolan is becoming too swept up in the trials that America’s most famous physicist experienced. Instead, it is here that the film’s complexities and all its many fragments finally converge as Nolan puts the finishing touches on his portrait of a man who contributed to an age of transformational scientific discovery, who personified the intersection of science and politics, including in his role as a Communist boogeyman, who was transformed by his role in the creation of weapons of mass destruction and soon after raised the alarm about the dangers of nuclear war.

François Truffaut once wrote that “war films, even pacifist, even the best, willingly or not, glorify war and render it in some way attractive.” This, I think, gets at why Nolan refuses to show the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, world-defining events that eventually killed an estimated 100,000 to upward of 200,000 souls. You do, though, see Oppenheimer watch the first test bomb and, critically, you also hear the famous words that he said crossed his mind as the mushroom cloud rose: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” As Nolan reminds you, the world quickly moved on from the horrors of the war to embrace the bomb. Now we, too, have become death, the destroyers of worlds.

Oppenheimer Rated R for disturbing images, and adult language and behavior. Running time: 3 hours. In theaters.

Audio produced by Kate Winslett .

An earlier version of this article misidentified J. Robert Oppenheimer as director of the Manhattan Project. He was director of its clandestine weapons laboratory, Los Alamos.

How we handle corrections

Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic of The Times, which she joined in 2004. She has an M.A. in cinema studies from New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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Oppenheimer First Reviews: Breathtaking, Ballsy, and One of the Best Biopics Ever Made

Critics say this may be not only christopher nolan's most impressive film but one of the best of the year, period, anchored by an award-worthy performance from cillian murphy..

TAGGED AS: blockbusters , First Reviews , movies

Here’s what critics are saying about Oppenheimer :

Is this possibly the best movie of the year?

“ Oppenheimer isn’t just an epic masterpiece but one of the most important films of the year.” – Danielle Solzman, Solzy at the Movies

“The most breathtaking film of the year.” – Jordan Hoffman, The Messenger

“This is a big, ballsy, serious-minded cinematic event of a type now virtually extinct from the studios.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“Unless Hollywood has a sleeper hit waiting in the wings, Oppenheimer is primed to be 2023’s best film.” – Maggie Lovitt, Millennial Falcon Reviews

“The film stands as the best of 2023.” – Sheraz Farooqi, Cinema Debate

“2023’s best.” – Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

“The best film of 2023 and one of the greatest biopics ever.” – David Gonzalez, The Cinematic Reel

(Photo by Melinda Sue Gordon/©Universal Pictures)

Will Christopher Nolan fans enjoy it?

“It’s hard to know how the Nolan fanboys will respond to a movie as heady, historically curious, and grounded in gravitas as Oppenheimer which has little in common with the brooding majesty of his Batman movies or the tricky mindf–kery of films like Inception or Tenet . In terms of its stirring solemnity, it’s perhaps closest to Dunkirk , while its melding of science and emotion recalls Interstellar .” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“ Oppenheimer feels like the culmination of everything the director has done so far in his already remarkable career.” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

“ Oppenheimer is nothing if not a biopic as only Christopher Nolan could make one. Indeed, it would seem like the ideal vehicle for Nolan’s career-long exploration into the black holes of the human condition — the last riddles of a terrifyingly understandable world.” – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

Is it one of his most impressive films?

“ Oppenheimer —a film of endless contrasts and contradictions—is the fullest expression of the writer/director’s artistry to date… surely the finest and most inspired film of Nolan’s career.” – Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

“Nolan has created not just one of his best films, but easily the most mature film of his career.” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

“With Oppenheimer , Nolan might just be at his most experimental… [He] is now in the conversation for the greatest director of all time.” – Sheraz Farooqi, Cinema Debate

“It may just be Nolan’s magnum opus… [his] most profound and career-defining film to date.” – Maggie Lovitt, Millennial Falcon Reviews

How is the screenplay?

“In what could be Christopher Nolan’s best screenplay thus far, Oppenheimer weaves through a three-act structure that can be divided into these unique entities; a rich character-driven deconstruction, a tense-filled thriller, and a politically laced courtroom drama.” – David Gonzalez, The Cinematic Reel

“It is undoubtedly his strongest script and most cohesive plot.” – Maggie Lovitt, Millennial Falcon Reviews

“Nolan has crafted an incredibly dense script that never manages to feel too convoluted or overwhelming—a feat in itself, considering how many timelines and characters are thrown into the mix.” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

Is it difficult to understand?

“While the four-act structure asks a lot of the film’s audience, our patience and concentration are amply rewarded.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“Considering the subject of Oppenheimer involves quantum mechanics, the film does a reasonable job explaining scientific concepts for laymen.” – Fred Topel, United Press International

How is Cillian Murphy in the title role?

“Cillian Murphy leads the ensemble for Oppenheimer with a career-defining performance… a tour de force, encapsulating the complexities of the man with a haunting intensity and continuous dead look in the eye.” – Sheraz Farooqi, Cinema Debate

“A tour de force… It’s a performance that demands his name to be called on Oscar nomination morning.” – David Gonzalez, The Cinematic Reel

“Murphy’s performance is every bit as inspired as his casting.” – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

“Murphy’s take on Oppenheimer will go down as one of the best performances ever captured by Nolan’s camera.” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

“Cillian Murphy, with a thousand-yard beam, the half-smile of an intellectual rake, and a way of keeping everything close to the vest, gives a phenomenal performance as Oppenheimer, making him fascinating and multi-layered.” – Owen Gleiberman, Variety

“It’s a magnificent marquee turn from the Peaky Blinders star (and frequent Nolan collaborator), providing a micro and macro concept of the physicist’s internal and external battles.” – Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

Do any of his co-stars particularly stand out?

“In a mighty ensemble of heavy-hitters, Downey gives the drama’s standout performance as Strauss, a founding member, and later chair, of the Atomic Energy Commission.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“Downey should be a shoo-in for the awards circuit. A Best Supporting Actor nomination might just be a lock.” – Sheraz Farooqi, Cinema Debate

“Downey offers a thunderous, Oscar-worthy performance that is one of his career’s best.” – David Gonzalez, The Cinematic Reel

“Special mention goes to David Krumholtz as Isidor Isaac Rabi.” – Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

“David Krumholtz is extraordinary…[and] in one of his best roles in years, there’s Matt Damon as Leslie Groves.” – Jordan Hoffman, The Messenger

“It speaks to the caliber of this cast that there’s not enough room to praise the excellent Kenneth Branagh, Casey Affleck and Rami Malek, all of whom make a porterhouse out of a slice of roast beef.” – Johnny Oleksinski, New York Post

How is the movie’s representation of women characters?

“Though efforts were made, one can’t deny this movie ignores the women characters.” – Jordan Hoffman, The Messenger

“Despite attempts to include three significant female characters in a male-dominated story, all three women fare poorly enough to suggest it might have been less glaring to stick to the military story.” – Fred Topel, United Press International

“Nolan still has problems with substantial female roles, and that does continue in Oppenheimer .” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

“Emily Blunt’s role at first seems limited to the supportive wife, urging her husband to fight harder for his reputation. But she has a knockout scene in the hearing.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

How does it look and sound?

“The major draw for hardcore film geeks will be the visuals… DP Hoyte van Hoytema brings visceral intensity to the Trinity sequence and extraordinary texture and depth of field to the many dialogue-driven scenes.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“Hoyte van Hoytema continues to impress as one of the best cinematographers. The film, shot with 70mm IMAX cameras, stands as one of the crowning achievements of IMAX with astonishing visuals that are set to leave with cinephiles upon the film’s conclusion.” – David Gonzalez, The Cinematic Reel

“Every frame is breathtaking, and just when you think you’ve seen all the tricks Nolan and van Hoytema have up their sleeves, they shock with another.” – Ross Bonaime, Collider

“Shot with grandeur by regular cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema, the film is sensorially overwhelming, its titanic visuals matched by Ludwig Göransson’s bellowing score of anxious ticking, thunderous foot-stomping, discordant buzzing, and strident Psycho-esque strings.” – Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

“Ludwig Göransson wrote a good score, but the constant use of it is exhausting… Nolan may have taken criticisms about his films’ inaudible dialogue to heart and strove to keep dialogue at least as audible as the music.” – Fred Topel, United Press International

(Photo by ©Universal Pictures)

What about the pacing?

“Nolan begins with a flurry of borderline avant-garde cutting between spaces, places, and faces (courtesy of stellar editor Jennifer Lame), and he never lets his foot off the gas… I can recall no biopic ever hurtling forward at such a scorching clip” – Nick Schager, The Daily Beast

“At no point did this film ever feel slow because it had my attention for every single minute.” – Danielle Solzman, Solzy at the Movies

“It’s more slow-burn than explosive.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

Does it have any surprises?

“Perhaps the most surprising element of this audacious epic is that the scramble for atomic armament ends up secondary to the scathing depiction of political gamesmanship.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“Many unbelievable scenes fill the entire screen.” – Johnny Oleksinski, New York Post

Do we need to see it in IMAX?

“If you’re lucky enough to be near one of the 30 screens worldwide showing the film in IMAX 70mm, you’ll experience a movie that, even at its talkiest, exerts an immersive hold, pulling you in to absorb the molecular detail of every shot.” – David Rooney, Hollywood Reporter

“See it in IMAX on 70-millimeter film — you’ll be very glad you did.” – Johnny Oleksinski, New York Post

“It’s a film that must be experienced on the biggest screen possible!” – Danielle Solzman, Solzy at the Movies

Oppenheimer opens in theaters everywhere on July 21, 2023.

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‘Oppenheimer’ Review: Christopher Nolan Makes a Riveting Historical Psychodrama, but It Doesn’t Build to a Big Bang

Cillian Murphy gives a phenomenal performance as J. Robert Oppenheimer, who oversaw creation of the atomic bomb, in a film that's ruthlessly authentic and, for much of its three hours, gripping.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

Chief Film Critic

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In the early scenes of “ Oppenheimer ,” J. Robert Oppenheimer ( Cillian Murphy ), an American physics student attending graduate school in England and Germany in the 1920s, with bright blue marble eyes and a curly wedge of hair that stands up like Charlie Chaplin’s, keeps having visions of particles and waves. We see the images that are disrupting his mind, the particles pulsating, the waves aglow in vibratory bands of light. Oppenheimer can see the brave new world of quantum physics, and the visual razzmatazz is exactly the sort of thing you’d expect from a biopic written and directed by Christopher Nolan : a molecular light show as a reflection of the hero’s inner spirit.

Cillian Murphy, with a thousand-yard beam, the half-smile of an intellectual rake, and a way of keeping everything close to the vest, gives a phenomenal performance as Oppenheimer, making him fascinating and multi-layered. His “Oppie” is an elegant mandarin who’s also a bit snakelike — at once a cold prodigy and an ardent humanist, an aristocrat and a womanizer, a Jewish outsider who becomes a consummate insider, and a man who oversees the invention of nuclear weapons without a shred of doubt or compunction, only to confront the world he created from behind a defensive shield of guilt that’s a lot less self-aware.

The film opens with a flash forward to the 1954 hearing of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission that ultimately resulted in Oppenheimer, accused (among other things) of having hidden Communist ties, being stripped of his security clearance. This was the government’s way of silencing him, since in the postwar world he’d become something of a dove on the issue of nuclear weapons, a view that didn’t mesh with America’s Cold War stance of aggression. The hearing was the darkest chapter of Oppenheimer’s life, and using it as a framing device feels, at first, like a very standard thing to do.

Except that the film keeps returning to the hearing, weaving it deep into the fabric of its three-hour running time. Lewis Strauss, played with a captivating bureaucratic terseness by Robert Downey Jr. , is the A.E.C. chairman who became Oppenheimer’s ideological and personal enemy (after Oppenheimer humiliated him during a congressional testimonial), and he’s the secret force behind the hearing, which takes place in a back room hidden away from the press. As Oppenheimer defends himself in front of a committee of hanging judges, the movie uses his anecdotes to flash back in time, and Nolan creates a hypnotic multi-tiered storytelling structure, using it to tease out the hidden continuities that shaped Oppenheimer’s life and his creation of the bomb.

We see how the Cold War really started before World War II was over — it was always there, shaping the rapt paranoia of atom-bomb politics. We see that Oppenheimer the ruthless nuclear zealot and Oppenheimer the mystic idealist were one and the same. And we see that the race to complete the Manhattan Project, rooted in the makeshift creation of a small desert city that Oppenheimer presides over in Los Alamos, New Mexico, meant that the momentum of the nuclear age was already taking on a life of its own.      

In the ’30s, Oppenheimer, already a legend in his own mind, brings quantum mechanics to the U.S., even as his field of passion encompasses Picasso, Freud, and Marx, not to mention the absorbing of half a dozen languages (from Dutch to Sanskrit), all to soak up the revolutionary energy field that’s sweeping the world, influencing everything from physics to workers’ liberation. Oppenheimer isn’t a Communist, but he’s a devoted leftist with many Communists in his life, from his brother and sister-and-law to his doleful bohemian mistress, Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh). What really makes his eyes go bright is when the atom gets split by two German scientists, in 1938. He at first insists it’s not possible, but then his colleagues at Berkeley, led by Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett), demonstrate that it is, and he realizes in an instant where all this points: to the possibility of a bomb.

“Oppenheimer” has a mesmerizing first half, encompassing everything from Oppenheimer’s mysterious Princeton encounter with Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) to his far from utopian marriage to the alcoholic Kitty (played with scalding force by Emily Blunt ). Just about everything we see is stunning in its accuracy. “Oppenheimer” isn’t a movie that traffics in composite characters or audience-friendly arcs; Nolan channels the grain of reality, the fervor and detail of what really happened. And the buildup to the creation of the first atomic bomb just about ticks with cosmic suspense. There are Soviet spies at Los Alamos, as well as a sinister comic grace note: the possibility (“a little more than zero”) that the chain reaction begun by the nuclear explosion could spread to the earth’s atmosphere and never stop, an apocalypse that theoretical physics can’t totally rule out.

But the big bang itself, when it finally arrives, as the bomb is tested in the wee hours of that fateful day code-named Trinity, is, I have to say, a letdown. Nolan shows it impressionistically — the sound cutting out, images of what look like radioactive hellfire. But the terrifying awesomeness, the nightmare bigness of it all, does not come across. Nor does it evoke the descriptions of witnesses who say that the blast was streaked with purple and gray and was many times brighter than the noonday sun.

And once Oppenheimer shoots past that nuclear climax, a certain humming intensity leaks out of the movie. We’re still at the damn A.E.C. hearing (after two hours), and the film turns into a woeful meditation on what the bomb meant, whether it should have been dropped, our rivalry with the Soviets, and how Oppenheimer figured into all of that, including his relegation to the status of defrocked Cold War scapegoat. What happened to Oppenheimer, at the height of the McCarthy era, was nothing less than egregious (though it’s relevant that he was never officially convicted of disloyalty). At the same time, there are scenes in which characters take him to task for his vanity, for making the bomb all about him . In one of them, he’s dressed down by no less than President Harry Truman (an unbilled Gary Oldman). Is Truman right?

The most radically authentic line in the movie may be the one where Oppenheimer, just after the Nazis have been defeated, explains to a room full of young Los Alamos scientists why he feels it’s still justifiable to use the bomb on Japan. We all know the dogmatic lesson we learned in high school: that dropping those bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war and saved the lives of countless U.S. soldiers. From the age of 15, I’ve never bought the rationale of that argument. But I buy what Oppenheimer says here: that by using a nuclear weapon, we would create a horrific demonstration of why it could never, ever be used again. (It’s not that that’s a justification . It’s that it’s an explanation of why it happened.)

Reviewed at AMC Lincoln Square, July 17, 2023. MPA Rating: R. Running time: 180 MIN.

• Production: A Universal Pictures release of a Syncopy production, in association with Atlas Entertainment. Producers: Emma Thomas, Charles Roven, Christopher Nolan. Executive producers: J. David Wargo, James Woods, Thomas Hayslip.
• Crew: Director, screenplay: Christopher Nolan. Camera: Hoyt van Hoytema. Editor: Jennifer Lame. Music: Ludwig Göransson.
• With: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Robert Downey Jr., Florence Pugh, Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, Kenneth Branagh.

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Oppenheimer Reviews

It's the bomb.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Apr 1, 2024

What promises to be Christopher Nolan's first cinematic masterpiece, evaporates before our eyes.

Full Review | Original Score: TWO STARS | Mar 24, 2024

For a film so enmeshed in ideas and loaded with meeting and conversations and debates (scientific and moral), it is as visually compelling as it is narratively.

Full Review | Mar 8, 2024

Downey’s performance is one of subtlety and guile, right up to the last twist. I have never seen an actor so thoroughly redeemed by taking a hard, thankless role like this.

Christopher Nolan’s latest is also his best-ever film. Fully at the height of his large-format artistic powers, he crafts a towering and monumental achievement that is highly difficult to watch but continuously thrilling.

Full Review | Mar 5, 2024

Unlike many epics, Oppenheimer is an actor’s dream.

Full Review | Feb 29, 2024

What do you want from theory alone?

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Feb 1, 2024

Pugh is heartbreaking, but doesn't get to shine as much as Emily Blunt (as Oppenheimer's wife Kitty). Long-suffering thanks to her husband's obsessive career and dalliances, Blunt nonetheless provides needed steel for Bob in the final scenes.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jan 25, 2024

I liked it, but thought the third act nearly cratered the whole thing.

Full Review | Jan 3, 2024

Nolan is a master of adding tension where there is very little, while deflating strenuous moments and creating an environment that is almost unbearable.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Jan 1, 2024

The film’s narrative, written and directed by Christopher Nolan, encompasses an effective blend of historical documentary with dramatic thriller and biography.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jan 1, 2024

A violent reckoning with America’s bloodlust, filtered through a man whose ego and naïveté facilitated one of the most unspeakable monstrosities in the history of the world; an unprecedented devastation that still reverberates through civilizations today.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Jan 1, 2024

Only Christopher Nolan could adapt Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s “American Prometheus,” a mammoth tome about American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, and have audiences gobble it up like his more traditional summer popcorn films

Full Review | Dec 30, 2023

Epic in scale and substance, writer-director Christopher Nolan has arguably produced the best film of his impressive career. He delivers a nuanced script ... and turns a complex and defining moment in history into a pulse-pounding thriller.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Dec 30, 2023

A fascinating hybrid of suspense thriller, character study, and memory play, Nolan's three-hour, CGI-free gabfest was his own Grand Budapest Hotel.

Full Review | Dec 29, 2023

Oppenheimer is an earth-shattering study of modern politics and governance that redefines what filmmaking can be.

Masterpiece.

Full Review | Original Score: A+ | Dec 27, 2023

Christopher Nolan's 'Oppenheimer' is a balanced, dense and strange combination of a film biography and an account of a historical event. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: A+ | Dec 26, 2023

A cinematic explosion and experience, although ironically it can at times implode against itself, mainly because of certain screenplay consequences that end up detracting from one of the most anticipated events of the year. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Dec 26, 2023

With great artistry and relentless precision, Oppenheimer tells the story of the man who created the nuclear bomb, and was haunted by the fallout for the rest of his life.

Full Review | Dec 22, 2023

• Movie Review

Oppenheimer is an unrelenting stream of bombastic vignettes in need of a narrative chain reaction

Christopher nolan’s oppenheimer epic offers a series of visceral glimpses into the life of the father of the atomic bomb but gets too busy to reach its full potential..

By Charles Pulliam-Moore , a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.

Share this story

Out of all this summer’s blockbusters that have had film buffs chomping at the bit, few (really just one, actually ) have elicited hype as visceral and sustained as Universal’s Oppenheimer biopic from director Christopher Nolan . With its sizable fleet of A-listers doing mid-20th-century accent work, a complicated historical figure at its center, and a respected auteur steering the ship, Oppenheimer has all the making of a summer blockbuster destined to continue dominating this year’s film discourse for months to come.

But for all of its explosive moments of grandeur and unsurprisingly powerful individual performances, Oppenheimer, as a whole, plays like a chaotic assortment of frantic vignettes coming from a storyteller who’s far too focused on the performance of sage profundity rather than sussing out the real thing.

Inspired by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s seminal 2005 Oppenheimer biography, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer , Oppenheimer is an account of the events that led to its eponymous theoretical physicist becoming one of the most lauded, hated, and infamous men in human history for his role in developing the atomic bomb. Oppenheimer commits most of its energy to chronicling the US’s race to develop nuclear weapons during World War II and the subsequent political fallout Oppenheimer weathered afterward as he began to advocate for nuclear nonproliferation. 

Like American Prometheus , though, Nolan’s new film also understands the importance of illustrating what kind of idiosyncratic, sexually frustrated, and politically engaged person Oppenheimer was in his pre-fame days — a time when he was still learning just how much of an influence he and his intellect could have over others. Long before he was being grilled by the Gray Board, gracing the covers of Time magazine, or directing the Manhattan Project laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) was an exceedingly brilliant but profoundly awkward young man looking for meaning in the arts and sciences.

Equal parts ensemble drama and stealth thriller, Oppenheimer frames its famed subject as a kind of human catalyst who — both in spite and because of his eccentric mind — innately radiates a kind of animating energy that compels most everyone around him into various kinds of action. It’s that energy that first pulls people like acerbic botanist and high-functioning alcoholic Katherine “Kitty” Puening (Emily Blunt) — Oppenheimer’s eventual wife — and depressive psychiatrist Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh) — his eventual longtime mistress — into his orbit. That energy’s also what makes so many of his peers gravitate toward him during his years coming up through academia and an important part of what puts him on the radar of Major General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) as he begins building the brain trust destined to power the Manhattan Project.

But there’s a chaos to its overall narrative structure that makes the film play like an assortment of overengineered individual scenes that only coalesce into something concrete occasionally before the movie shifts its focus and attempts to repeat the process to varying degrees of success.

At the same time the movie’s trying to illustrate how Oppenheimer’s left-wing political sensibilities and youthful experiences with labor organization informed his adult worldview, it’s also digging into his love life and the professional jealousies of Oppenheimer’s peers that made him both a threat and someone to look up to. All of that is deeply important context for the film’s quick-fire scenes set during the mid-’50s as United States Atomic Energy Commission commissioner Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) heads up hearings designed to strip Oppenheimer of his security clearance and deeply discredit him in the public eye.

But Oppenheimer is so prone to bouncing around from one brief, intense, overly patter-filled scene to another that it often feels like Nolan might have simply shot far, far too much footage and then ultimately cherry-picked the moments that felt impactful to him rather than the ones necessary to set off a narrative chain reaction resulting in a cohesive movie.

This is especially unfortunate because, by and large, many of Oppenheimer ’s actors — Blunt, Damon, and Murphy, in particular — are delivering truly fantastic, studied performances that speak to the humanity and complexity of their characters. Both Rami Malek and Alden Ehrenreich are tremendous as Los Alamos physicist David Hill and an unnamed Senate aide, respectively, and Dane DeHaan is downright chilling as Army officer Kenneth Nichols. But because of Oppenheimer ’s structure, almost none of these performances really have enough time to take up the space they deserve, and just when you’ve gotten a chance to become comfortable and fully engaged with them, the movie’s already moved on.

Though composer Ludwig Göransson’s score is often beautiful, rather than flowing throughout the film consistently in time with its emotional beats, it fades in and out much like the movie’s vignettes frequently fade to black, and it tends to emphasize how disjointed they feel. But Oppenheimer ’s sound — that is to say, its sound design — is arguably the most interesting (though not always well-executed) aspect of the film and what most moviegoers are going to end up being blown away by, in multiple senses of the phrase.

For obvious reasons, there are more than a few explosions that punctuate Oppenheimer ’s three-hour runtime. But instead of fixating solely on the visual spectacle of towering infernos designed to mutilate and massacre, Nolan instead tries to use sound to make you feel a fraction of the devastation Oppenheimer became famous for. Though this approach works well when the movie’s depicting explosions, it truly begins to shine later on in the film after the atomic bombs have been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Oppenheimer — surrounded by fellow Americans drunk on the idea of American exceptionalism — can’t help but marvel in horror at the idea of what his life’s work has culminated in.

It’s in moments like those — when Oppenheimer ’s directly addressing the reality of the US’s decisions made as WWII was coming to an end rather than mythologizing the men behind those decisions — that the movie’s at its absolute best. But ultimately, those moments are so few and far between that Oppenheimer always feels like an assortment of great filmmaking ideas being hamstrung by their haphazard execution.

Oppenheimer also stars Josh Hartnett, Casey Affleck, Kenneth Branagh, Benny Safdie, Dylan Arnold, Gustaf Skarsgård, Matthew Modine, David Dastmalchian, Tom Conti, Michael Angarano, Jack Quaid, Olivia Thirlby, Tony Goldwyn, Emma Dumont, and Gary Oldman. The movie hits theaters on July 21st.

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Oppenheimer (I) (2023)

• User Reviews
• Cillian Murphy gives one of the most surprising leading man performances in ages and just might win an Oscar for his excellent portrayal of Robert Oppenheimer. He fully transforms into the highly complex and increasingly conflicted man, his eyes ooze tension, his voice is on point, and his demeanour is congruent.
• The entire 2nd act (the building of the Manhattan Project's Los Alamos laboratory and the eventual detonation of the first atomic bomb) is the best part of the movie.
• Oppenheimer's shaken and stirred speech after the Trinity test is arguably the most engrossing and immersive movie-making of this summer.
• Great Hollywood actors and actresses galore.
• Many poignant time jump edits.
• The scene with Oppenheimer and president Truman in the oval office.
• Hair and make-up department convincingly depicts Oppenheimer (and some of the rest) from student years to the last stages of their lives.
• In (surprisingly) typical Nolan fashion, the very ending is a satisfying (if slightly fizzled by the 3rd act) "twist" that was being built up throughout the movie.
• A big portion of the movie is a dissapointing bait-and-switch. It focuses way too much time on Oppenheimer's pre-Trinity political activity and post-Trinity kangaroo trial without a satisfactory reason to do so. The 1st and especially the overly long 3rd act needed tighter editing and the movie would have been better for it. The build-up to the powerful ending could easily be slightly modified and still pack the same if not an even bigger, much needed gut-wrenching punch.
• The pacing is overly dense because it tries to jam-pack too much of Oppie's pre- and post-Trinity life into one movie. Nolan adds a plethora of new characters we can just barely remember and his time jump edits are sometimes unnecessary and hard to follow.
• Not nearly enough of the movie is about the actual technical feat of building the first atomic bomb.

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Oppenheimer review: Clever, imaginative and Christopher Nolan at his best

Cillian murphy allows the light to dim from his eyes in every subsequent scene, but it is robert downey jr who is titanic here, article bookmarked.

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Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan ’s best and most revealing work. It’s a profoundly unnerving story told with a traditionalist’s eye towards craftsmanship and muscular, cinematic imagination. Here, Nolan treats one of the most contested legacies of the 20th century – that of J Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy ), the “father of the atomic bomb” – as a mathematical puzzle to be solved.

In 1943, at the behest of Major General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), Oppenheimer became director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, the Manhattan Project’s New Mexico site for attempting to successfully build an atomic bomb. Oppenheimer, at first, was driven by moral imperative: he feared deeply, as a Jewish man, about what would happen if the Nazis were to develop a weapon of such deadly capability (that a non-Jewish actor has taken on a role in which identity plays such a central role is, in this light, somewhat strange).

Following Hitler’s defeat, Oppenheimer continued to support the bomb’s deployment in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, convinced that such hellish destruction would not only bring an end to the war in the Pacific, but to all wars. Historians have since disputed the idea that the bombs were in any way necessary for Japan’s surrender (the real turning point, it seems, was the threat of Soviet invasion). And Oppenheimer’s own utopian vision was swiftly dismantled by fellow scientist Edward Teller (Benny Safdie) and the chair of the US Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr), who pushed forward with the creation of the H-bomb, a thousand times deadlier in its scope.

Oppenheimer attempted, in vain, to halt the subsequent nuclear arms race between the US and the Soviet Union. He was promptly silenced using one of America’s most cherished tools of political oppression – anti-Communist hysteria. He was attacked for his personal associations with the Communist Party, through his brother Frank (Dylan Arnold), wife Kitty (Emily Blunt), and ex-lover Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh). It was an act of pure, public humiliation.

Nolan observes each of these chapters with sickly wonder, as Jennifer Lame’s editing work and Ludwig Göransson’s clattering score lend Oppenheimer a frightening momentum. The film is constructed in a way that allows its audience to comprehend, on an intellectual level, the profound power and chaos that led its central character to see himself as the “Death, destroyer of worlds” of Hindu scripture. I’m not sure, however, that it burrows deeper than that – into that profound, emotional space that can be both overwhelming and difficult to verbalise. It’s a little too conscious of itself, and the ways cinema crafts its own reality. Throughout, the film teases an unheard conversation between Oppenheimer and Albert Einstein (Tom Conti), its inevitable reveal delivered in the same tone as the solution to the teleportation trick in Nolan’s own The Prestige .

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But the prioritisation of cleverness in Oppenheimer isn’t necessarily a criticism of Nolan – more a testament to who he is as an artist. The detonation of the A-bomb, during its first test in the New Mexico desert, is depicted as booming tufts of flame in extreme close-up, coupled with enraptured onlookers. You sense its primal force, the kind of untapped power that led Oppenheimer to view himself as a kind of American Prometheus (also the title of a 2005 biography Nolan drew heavily from). But contrast that, perhaps, with how David Lynch approached the same A-bomb test in his 2017 limited series Twin Peaks: The Return . Lynch drew the camera in, slowly, confronting us with the full-scale of the weapon’s destruction, while sucking us into its very centre, damning us through its inescapability. Nolan’s A-bomb is wondrous until we consider its context; Lynch’s A-bomb is pure nightmare.

The film’s non-linear structure (de rigueur for the Tenet and Inception filmmaker), with each timeline beautifully lensed by Hoyte van Hoytema in either colour or black and white, lends a little more focus to Oppenheimer’s post-war betrayal than it does to the blossoming of his guilt. Large swathes of the film play out as political thriller, the fuel in its engine being Downey Jr’s titanic colouring of Strauss, all boorishness and manipulative charm.

But Nolan is still committed to understanding the innerworkings of his subject. Here’s a man deep in denial. When confronted with photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he averts his gaze. Its horrors rumble (literally) in his peripheral vision, only clear to him when he imagines such brutality inflicted on the white Americans celebrating his “victory” in Los Alamos. Murphy creates his own devastating fission: brilliance torn apart by arrogance. Scene by scene, the light behind his eyes starts to dim. He even has sex the same way he builds bombs. After his extramarital affair turns sour, his wife Kitty chastises him: “You don’t get to commit a sin and then make us all feel sorry when there are consequences.” In Oppenheimer , a man’s private, internal, and political lives are strung together, each a component of the great equation that defines a man’s soul.

Dir: Christopher Nolan. Starring: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Tom Conti, Casey Affleck, Rami Malek, Josh Hartnett, Kenneth Branagh. 15, 180 minutes.

‘Oppenheimer’ is in cinemas from 21 July

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Oppenheimer review: Christopher Nolan masterfully captures one of history’s defining figures

As the so-called "father of the atomic bomb", American theoretical physicist J Robert Oppenheimer was also, in a sense, the granddaddy of modern spectacle, setting off a big bang whose blast radius spread out across the entirety of modern culture. Few images were more terrifying – or more awesome – than the mushroom cloud generated by a nuclear explosion, an image seared into the visual language of politics, media and entertainment of the late 20th century and beyond.

Even his famously cheerful quote – "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" – has come to sound less like a lift from the Bhagavad Gita than a quip from a movie supervillain presiding over some de rigueur apocalypse.

It's fitting, then, that this seismic story (based on the 2005 biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin) should be brought to the screen by Christopher Nolan, that reigning brainiac of the blockbuster whose gift for engineering spectacle has made him one of the key architects of the new millennium's multiplex.

In this age of cookie-cutter IP, the British filmmaker is one of the few remaining auteurs capable of commanding a studio budget to mount an original project of scale and ambition, and to his credit he's used that clout to deliver what is essentially a three-hour movie comprised of men talking in close-ups (call it the fedora-friendly Women Talking ), albeit staged in towering 70mm IMAX that renders its subjects as starched-collar colossuses.

In taking on the moral complexity of a brilliant, hubristic visionary, it also feels like Nolan is reckoning with his own place in the history of 21st-century cinema, as a destroyer of cinematic worlds, whose blockbuster Batman films played a significant part in reshaping the contemporary movie landscape.

From a certain point of view, it might be the most personal film he's ever made.

Nolan regular Cillian Murphy ( Batman Begins ; Inception ), his otherworldly blue eyes and pout looming almost comically large, plays Oppenheimer, who we first meet at the centre of the US government's 1954 security hearing led by Lewis Strauss, the atomic energy commissioner with a political and personal axe to grind (he's played by a slippery Robert Downey Jr., reminding us of the great actor he was before entering a decade-plus purgatory of glib Marvel mugging).

Couched in grainy, newsreel black-and-white, it's all stuffy courtrooms and stiff suits, McCarthyism and Red Scare in full flight, as the investigating committee tries to lay blame for an information leak in the Manhattan Project on Oppenheimer and his suspected communist sympathies.

At the same time, the movie enters a series of nested, structurally ambitious flashbacks, to Oppenheimer's first meeting with Strauss – and what will become a pivotal encounter with Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) – and to his early career in the 20s and 30s, as he transforms from an anxious Cambridge student with a headful of T.S. Eliot and Picasso to an assured Berkeley academic whose idealistic curiosity draws him into the orbit of left-wing radicals.

From these circles come Oppenheimer's great romances. There's Jean Tatlock (a fleeting but fiery Florence Pugh), a young physician with whom he enters a prolonged, sporadic affair, and Katherine 'Kitty' Oppenheimer (Emily Blunt, mostly relegated to performing 'alcoholic wife'), a jaded former radical who he would go on to marry.

Nolan's dabbling in romance, never one of his strong suits, alternately yields some of the film's clumsiest and prettiest images. An intimate scene where Oppenheimer reads his soon-to-be-infamous quote from the Sanskrit text – which Jean holds just below her naked breasts – is as charmingly awkward in its sex-and-death fusion as it is brazen for daring to exist in this age of the chaste blockbuster. Scenes of Oppenheimer and Kitty swooning against the Santa Fe ranch sky – with the former looking like a gaunt cowboy detective – have the spooky sweep of cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema's work on Jordan Peele's fantastic Nope , another film with a view to unpacking cinema's fraught spectacle.

One of Nolan's great strokes is to splice Oppenheimer's thoughts, and Murphy's glassy, galactic stare, into cosmic montages of swirling molecules, particles and dying stars (a fittingly Kuleshovian move ), impressionistic images that have the effect of a Stan Brakhage film projected onto a planetarium dome. (It's hard to imagine Nolan didn't take a cue from the atomic sequence in David Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return , a dizzying macro zoom into a mushroom cloud that remains one of the greatest sequences ever put to screen.)

Nolan and editor Jennifer Lame ( Tenet ) build this montage to show-stopping effect in the film's centrepiece, as Oppenheimer and his team, under the supervision of gung-ho Colonel Leslie Groves (a reliably buoyant Matt Damon), race to build and test an atomic bomb at a secret site in the Los Alamos desert. It's a typically bravura sequence, full of stark images of men slathered in sunscreen and wearing fly-eye goggles, but it's even more remarkable for what it withholds; just as the blast hits, Nolan lets his stentorian sound mix fall away, leaving us in the stark company of human breathing.

It's this sense of anti-spectacle that gives Oppenheimer its curious, cumulative power.

True to the director's form, Oppenheimer plays more or less like a three-hour trailer, with endlessly clipped scenes and thunderous, wall-to-wall music from composer Ludwig Göransson that goes from elegantly weird to overbearing, especially as it thrums beneath scenes of otherwise subdued dialogue. It's all tease with little payoff, befitting a tapestry of frustrated men squabbling over weapons of mass destruction.

Yet all of this works to enhance Oppenheimer's strange effect, not to diminish it, and by the film's final moments it has, often by sheer force rather than any kind of elegance, cemented itself as an enormous, ugly-beautiful object infused with as much melancholy as bombast.

"You're the American Prometheus, the man who gave them the power to destroy themselves," Danish physicist Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh) tells Oppenheimer. In examining that power through the spectacle it indirectly inspired, Nolan's film opens up a fascinating conversation with both the destruction of the past and the cinema of the present. Go see it.

Oppenheimer is in cinemas now.

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Movie Review: A bomb and its fallout in Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Cillian Murphy in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Robert Downey Jr as Lewis Strauss in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Matt Damon as Gen. Leslie Groves, left, and Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer, left, and Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Dane Dehaan as Kenneth Nichols in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock, left, and Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Jason Clarke is Roger Robb in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures via AP)

This image released by Universal Pictures shows Benny Safdie as Edward Teller in a scene from “Oppenheimer.” (Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures via AP)

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Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” is a kinetic thing of dark, imposing beauty that quakes with the disquieting tremors of a forever rupture in the course of human history.

“Oppenheimer,” a feverish three-hour immersion in the life of Manhattan Project mastermind J. Robert Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy), is poised between the shock and aftershock of the terrible revelation, as one character calls it, of a divine power.

There are times in Nolan’s latest opus that flames fill the frame and visions of subatomic particles flitter across the screen — montages of Oppenheimer’s own churning visions. But for all the immensity of “Oppenheimer,” this is Nolan’s most human-scaled film — and one of his greatest achievements.

It’s told principally in close-ups, which, even in the towering detail of IMAX 70mm, can’t resolve the vast paradoxes of Oppenheimer. He was said to be a magnetic man with piercing blue eyes (Murphy has those in spades) who became the father of the atomic bomb but, in speaking against nuclear proliferation and the hydrogen bomb, emerged as America’s postwar conscience.

Nolan, writing his own adaptation of Martin J. Sherwin and Kai Bird’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 book “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” layers the build-up to the Manhattan Project with two moments from years later.

In 1954, a probing inquiry into Oppenheimer’s leftist politics by a McCarthy-era Atomic Energy Commission stripped him of his security clearance. This provides the frame of “Oppenheimer,” along with a Senate confirmation hearing for Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), who chaired the Atomic Energy Commission and was a stealthy nemesis to Oppenheimer.

The grubby, political machinations of these hearings — the Strauss section is captured in black and white — act like a stark X-ray of Oppenheimer’s life. It’s an often brutal, unfair interrogation that weighs Oppenheimer’s decisions and accomplishment, inevitably, in moral terms. “Who’d want to justify their whole life?” someone wonders. For the maker of the world’s most lethal weapon, it’s an especially complicated question.

These separate timelines give “Oppenheimer” — dimly lit and shadowy even in the desert — a noirish quality (Nolan has said all his films are ultimately noirs) in reckoning with a physicist who spent the first half of his life in headlong pursuit of a new science and the second half wrestling with the consequences of his colossal, world-altering invention.

“Oppenheimer” moves too fast to come to any neat conclusions. Nolan, as if reaching to match the electron, dives into the story at a blistering pace. From start to finish, “Oppenheimer” buzzes with a heady frequency, tracking Oppenheimer as a promising student in the then-unfolding field of quantum mechanics. “Can you hear the music, Robert?” asks the elder Danish physicist Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh). He can, absolutely, but that doesn’t mean finding harmony.

Nolan, whose last film was the time-traveling, palindrome-rich “Tenet,” may be the only filmmaker for whom delving into quantum mechanics could be considered a step down in complexity. But “Oppenheimer” is less interested in equations than the chemistry of an expanding mind. Oppenheimer reads “The Waste Land” and looks at modernist painting. He dabbles in the communist thinking of the day. (His mistress, Jean Tatlock, played arrestingly, tragically by Florence Pugh, is a party member.) But he aligns with no single cause. “I like a little wiggle room,” says Oppenheimer.

For a filmmaker synonymous with grand architectures — psychologies mapped onto subconscious worlds (“Inception”) and cosmic reaches ( “Interstellar” ) — “Oppenheimer” resides more simply in its subject’s fertile imagination and anguished psyche. (The script was written in first person.) Nolan and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema render Oppenheimer’s interiority with flashes of images that stretch across the heavens. His brilliance comes from his limitlessness of thought.

Just how much “wiggle room” Oppenheimer is permitted, though, becomes a more acute point when war breaks out and he’s tasked by Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves Jr. (Matt Damon) to lead the race to beat the Nazis to an atomic bomb. The rapid building of Los Alamos on the white-sand mesas of New Mexico — a site chosen by and with personal meaning to Oppenheimer — might not be so different than the erecting of movie sets for Nolan’s massive films, which likewise tend to culminate with a spectacular explosion.

There is something inherently queasy about a big-screen spectacle dramatizing the creation — justified or not — of a weapon of mass destruction. Oppenheimer once called the atomic bomb “a weapon for aggressors” wherein “the elements of surprise and terror are as intrinsic to it as are the fissionable nuclei.” Surely a less imperial, leviathan filmmaker than Nolan — a British director making an American epic — might have approached the subject differently.

But the responsibility of power has long been one of Nolan’s chief subjects (think of the all-powerful surveillance machine of “The Dark Knight”). And “Oppenheimer” is consumed with not just the ethical quandary of the Manhattan Project but every ethical quandary that Oppenheimer encounters. Big or small, they could all lead to valor or damnation. What makes “Oppenheimer” so unnerving is how indistinguishable one is from the other.

“Oppenheimer” sticks almost entirely to its protagonist’s point of view yet also populates its three-hour film with an incredible array of faces, all in exquisite detail. Some of the best are Benny Safdie as the hydrogen bomb designer Edward Teller; Jason Clarke as gruff special counsel Roger Robb; Gary Oldman as President Harry Truman; Alden Ehrenreich as an aide to Strauss; Macon Blair as Oppenheimer’s attorney; and Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer, the physicist’s wife.

The greatest of all of them, though, is Murphy. The actor, a Nolan regular, has always been able to communicate something more disturbing underneath his angular, angelic features. But here, his Oppenheimer is a fascinating coil of contradictions: determined and aloof, present and far-away, brilliant but blind.

Dread hangs over him, and over the film, with the inevitable. The future, post-Hiroshima, is sounded most by the wail of children who will grow up in that world; the Oppenheimers’ babies do nothing but cry.

When the Trinity test comes at Los Alamos after the toil of some 4,000 people and the expense of $2 billion, there’s a palpable, shuddering sense of history changing inexorably. How Nolan captures these sequences — the quiet before the sound of the explosion; the disquieting, thunderous, flag-waving applause that greets Oppenheimer after — are masterful, unforgettable fusions of sound and image, horror and awe.

“Oppenheimer” has much more to go. Government encroaches on science, with plenty of lessons for today’s threats of annihilation. Downey, in his best performance in years, strides toward the center of the film. You could say the film gets bogged down here, relegating a global story to a drab backroom hearing, preferring to vindicate Oppenheimer’s legacy rather than wrestle with harder questions of fallout. But “Oppenheimer” is never not balanced, uncomfortably, with wonder at what humans are capable of, and fear that we don’t know what to do with it.

“Oppenheimer,” a Universal Pictures release is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for some sexuality, nudity and language. Running time: 180 minutes. Four stars out of four.

Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP

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‘Oppenheimer’: Christopher Nolan’s Starry Biopic Is Big, Loud, and a Must-See

• By David Fear

This is what Christopher Nolan does in Oppenheimer , a biopic on the “father of the atomic bomb,” and in terms of getting you into the mindset of its subject, these bursts of abstract imagery are a brilliant move on his part. It’s not the only ace the writer-director has up his well-tailored sleeve, mind you — there are somewhere between four to five timelines bumping against each other at any given moment, it’s shot in both saturated color and stark black & white, its sound design equally prizes dead silence and deafening booms, and the cast is comprised of seemingly every third actor with a SAG card. Not to mention a depth-charge performance by Cillian Murphy as the Man Who Would Be Destroyer of Worlds, one that allows the tiniest surface ripples to communicate the agony and the ecstasy of changing the world.

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Taking its cues from the exhaustive, Pulitzer-winning book American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, Oppenheimer seeks to cram as much of the man’s life, his work, his elevation to national hero, his eventual persecution, and his personal demons into three hours. Just for good measure, Nolan throws in not one but two competing courtroom dramas as well. There’s a roll-the-dice sensation throughout: Scenes of people sitting in rooms talking can seem thrilling or plodding, clarify historical conflicts and complicated concepts or confuse the hell out of you. Set pieces feel sweeping one second, and like they’re sucking the oxygen out of the room the next. Then, suddenly, the movie cuts to a huge close-up of Murphy, his eyes suggesting a man wrestling for his soul, and you’re transfixed. As with so much of Nolan’s work, you can feel a truly great film peeking out in fits and spurts within a longer, slightly uneven one.

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So let us now praise movies about famous men, and the famous men who make them. Oppenheimer is most assuredly a Christopher Nolan film, complete with the blessings and the curses of what that phrase entails. The good stuff first: There are a handful of sequences that remind you why this 52-year-old director is considered a godhead by film geeks, genre freaks, and armchair arthouse-cinema scholars alike. When Nolan is on, he is on , as evidenced by the early scenes of Oppenheimer and his military liaison, General Leslie Groves ( Matt Damon , all mustache and bluster), assembling the eggheads. Their plan is to turn the small New Mexico burg of Los Alamos into a self-sufficient, family-friendly town for a group of scientists and a top-secret think tank for a weapon of mass destruction. The military need the end result of the Manhattan Project to win WWII, preferably before the Germans develop their own version of “the gadget.” Oppenheimer, both compelled by and wary of the opportunity, wants them to maintain the “moral advantage” after the world sees what this thing can do.

Concentrating on the mounting pressure to deliver, the miniature steps forward with each behind-the-scenes breakthrough, and the accountability factor causing friction between the project leader and his patrons, Oppenheimer becomes its own ticking time bomb. All the while, fractures are happening within the team, and the precariousness of the situation, along with Oppenheimer’s willingness to go through with opening this Pandora’s Box, brings things to a tipping point. These scenes remind you of how Nolan understands the use of sound and vision as a means of emotional engagement (helped in no small part by his regular cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema and composer Ludwig Göransson ‘s score); how his ability to fold complex ideas into presentations of human behavior, and vice versa, comes through in his writing; how the timing of a cut and the framing of an image can transform a moment from grandiose or mundane to sublime. The gent is a genuine filmmaker. He’s a big-screen artist, the bigger the screens the better.

There’s Florence Pugh , and Emily Blunt , and Benny Safdie , Josh Hartnett, Rami Malek , Kenneth Branagh , Casey Affleck , Jason Clarke, Matthew Modine, Olivia Thirlby, Dane DeHaan, Alden Ehrenreich … it’s actually quicker to list who’s not in Oppenheimer. Nolan has said he wanted to cast recognizable faces so that audiences could keep track of who’s who easier, but he also gives them opportunities to flex, whether it’s for a minute or the majority of the running time. And given that there are so many scenes of people conversing, reading, lecturing, interrogating, handwringing and musing over the morality of mass destruction, they have to keep things afloat as much as their ringmaster.

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As those two trials intertwine and paint a picture of Oppenheimer as both McCarthy-era martyr and, ultimately, the victor over Strauss’s smear campaign during the movie’s last act, there’s a slight sensation of listening to wind blowing through torn sails. In attempting to get a 360-degree picture of his subject’s life and times on as big a scale as possible, it feels as if Nolan occasionally loses sight of the big picture as a whole. Oppenheimer is one of those shoot-for-the-moon projects that feels thrilling and wonky, brilliant and overstuffed, too much and yet not enough. It’s also a movie that brings to mind the difficult era-spanning epics of yesteryear, from Reds to The Right Stuff, and is a movie made by adults for adults yet done with the sweep and majesty we now associate with movies made for kids and teens. Nolan has made what can sometimes feel like a maddeningly elusive attempt to make a grand statement about then and now, only to continually drown himself out in the technical equivalent of the Zimmer Honk . He’s also given us one of the only movies of the summer that you really have to see.

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Oppenheimer Review

21 Jul 2023

Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer  is not an easy movie. To say its subject matter and theme are inherently downbeat is something of an understatement. It flings you into a very specific, crowded world and refuses to hold your hand, with a notable absence of date- or location-providing subtitles. It is three hours long, densely packed with info-rich dialogue, and mostly plays out, to paraphrase one character, in “shabby little rooms far from the limelight”. Its story unfurls along two oscillating lines – one titled “Fission”, in vivid colour; the other titled “Fusion” in high-contrast black-and-white – and cuts between their beats and revelations like an anxious channel-hopper. It is, of course, a Christopher Nolan movie.

However, despite being deeply stamped with Nolan’s hallmarks (anti-chronological, shot with IMAX cameras, avoids CGI, stars Cillian Murphy ),  Oppenheimer  feels like something new from the writer-director. While it has a logline-level similarity to Nolan’s favourite Spielberg film,  Raiders Of The Lost Ark (a man in a hat is racing the Nazis for control of an existentially powerful weapon), its release — and impact — feel more like we’ve reached Nolan’s Schindler’s List moment: a step into deadly serious, portentously resonant, adult material. With one fundamental difference: this difficult historical figure is on a very different trajectory to Oskar Schindler. One might even say the exact opposite trajectory.

Oppenheimer  is based on  American Prometheus , Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s wide-spined biography of the theoretical physicist who “fathered” the atomic bomb. But it is not a biopic. No time is spent on J. Robert’s childhood, with his disturbingly troubled early academic life tackled only briefly. Instead, the film moves briskly from his establishment of quantum theory on US curricula to his recruitment as director of the Manhattan Project (by take-no-shit Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, played with avuncular appeal by Matt Damon).

At the film’s pulsing nucleus is Murphy as Oppenheimer, and he is compelling throughout.

Interestingly, Nolan does devote some time to Oppenheimer’s romantic entanglements, allowing Florence Pugh to elegantly dominate her few scenes as communist activist Jean Tatlock, the physicist’s first lover (which also involve a Nolan first: sex scenes with prolonged nudity). Meanwhile, Emily Blunt thankfully busts out of the supportive/suffering wife archetype as the alcoholic but sharp-witted Kitty Oppenheimer, who gives us one of the film’s most rousing scenes in an intense verbal duel with bullish lawyer Roger Robb (Jason Clarke).

Given the sheer extent of the dramatis personae, it’s no exaggeration to say that  Oppenheimer  features Nolan’s most impressive cast yet. Playing admirably against type, Robert Downey Jr. leads the “Fusion” strand as haughty US Atomic Energy Commissioner Lewis Strauss, whose attempt to join Eisenhower’s cabinet as Secretary of Commerce becomes intriguingly more relevant as the film progresses. Then we have a supporting cast like no other: Benny Safdie as Edward Teller (the inspiration for  Dr Strangelove ), Kenneth Branagh as Oppenheimer’s Danish mentor Niels Bohr, Josh Hartnett as his close colleague Ernest Lawrence — plus the likes of Olivia Thirlby, Rami Malek, Jack Quaid, Macon Blair, Casey Affleck, David Krumholtz and Alden Ehrenreich popping up in sometimes the smallest of roles. Not to mention Gary Oldman’s acidic cameo as President Truman, who famously dismissed Oppenheimer as “a cry-baby scientist”.

At the film’s pulsing nucleus is Murphy as Oppenheimer, and he is compelling throughout. Given the movie’s hefty import, you’d have expected him to infuse every ounce of his talent into this performance, and that is certainly evident from his every moment on screen — often with cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema’s IMAX lens focused squarely and unsparingly on his face, as he conjures the conflicting emotions that rage beneath Oppenheimer’s surface. This is, after all, a uniquely complex man: praised as a hero for ending the war, wracked with guilt over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and perhaps desperate to cleanse his soul through martyrdom.

Nolan complements this exquisitely tuned performance by using his subject’s memories and visions as a kind of visual punctuation, from raindrops rippling ominously in puddles like bomb blasts, to a chilling, briefly glimpsed depiction of “atmospheric ignition”: a posited world-ending outcome of the first A-bomb test. The Trinity sequence itself, in which Nolan’s SFX team somehow create a CG-free approximation of a nuclear explosion, is truly shock-and-awesome, featuring what might just be cinema’s most intense countdown scene. But the film is never visually stronger than when it is inside Oppenheimer’s head, especially during its lengthy closing act, when apparitions of his creation’s life-snuffing effects bleed into his waking life with such nightmarish potency, they’ll be hard to shake for days.

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What Japanese moviegoers have to say about Oppenheimer as it debuts on Hiroshima, Nagasaki screens

Movie opens 8 months after north american debut, previous controversy over 'barbenheimer' imagery.

Hiroshima residents react to Oppenheimer's debut in Japan

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Oppenheimer finally premiered Friday in the nation where two cities were obliterated 79 years ago by the nuclear weapons invented by the American scientist who was the subject of the Oscar-winning film. The reviews of Japanese filmgoers who spoke to reporters were understandably mixed and highly emotional.

The film's release in Japan, more than eight months after it opened in the U.S., had been watched with trepidation because of the sensitivity of the subject matter. 

Oppenheimer — which won seven Academy Awards earlier this month , including best picture — does not directly depict what happened on the ground when the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, instead focusing on J. Robert Oppenheimer as a person and his internal conflicts. Some 100,000 people were instantly killed in the bombings, mostly civilians, and thousands more perished in the days that followed.

Toshiyuki Mimaki, who survived the bombing of Hiroshima when he was three, said he has been fascinated by the story of Oppenheimer, often called "the father of the atomic bomb" for leading the Manhattan Project.

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"What were the Japanese thinking, carrying out the attack on Pearl Harbor, starting a war they could never hope to win," he said, sadness in his voice, in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.

He is now chairperson of a group of bomb victims called the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organization, and he saw Oppenheimer at a preview event. "During the whole movie, I was waiting and waiting for the Hiroshima bombing scene to come on, but it never did," Mimaki said.

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Hiroshima mayor critical of film

Former Hiroshima mayor Takashi Hiraoka, who spoke at a preview event for the film in the southwestern city, was more critical of what was omitted.

"From Hiroshima's standpoint, the horror of nuclear weapons was not sufficiently depicted," he was quoted as saying by Japanese media. "The film was made in a way to validate the conclusion that the atomic bomb was used to save the lives of Americans."

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Some moviegoers offered praise. One man emerging from a Tokyo theatre Friday said the movie was great, stressing that the topic was of great interest to Japanese people, although emotionally volatile as well. Another said he got choked up over the film's scenes depicting Oppenheimer's inner turmoil. Neither man would give his name to an Associated Press journalist.

In a sign of the historical controversy, a backlash flared last year over the "Barbenheimer" marketing phenomenon that merged pink-and-fun Barbie with seriously intense Oppenheimer . Warner Bros. Japan, which distributed Barbie in the country, apologized after some memes depicted the Mattel doll with atomic blast imagery.

Kazuhiro Maeshima, professor at Sophia University, who specializes in U.S. politics, called the film an expression of "an American conscience."

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Those who expect an anti-war movie may be disappointed. But the telling of Oppenheimer's story in a Hollywood blockbuster would have been unthinkable several decades ago, when justification of nuclear weapons dominated American sentiments, Maeshima said.

"The work shows an America that has changed dramatically," he said in a telephone interview.

'Starting point' for important topic: Japanese historian

Others suggested the world might be ready for a Japanese response to that story.

Takashi Yamazaki, director of Godzilla Minus One , which won the Oscar for visual effects and is a powerful statement on nuclear catastrophe in its own way, suggested he might be the man for that job.

"I feel there needs to [be] an answer from Japan to Oppenheimer . Someday, I would like to make that movie," he said in an online dialogue with Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan.

Nolan heartily agreed.

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Hiroyuki Shinju, a lawyer, noted Japan and Germany also carried out wartime atrocities, even as the nuclear threat grew around the world. Historians say Japan was also working on nuclear weapons during the Second World War and would have almost certainly used them against other nations, Shinju said.

"This movie can serve as the starting point for addressing the legitimacy of the use of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as humanity's, and Japan's, reflections on nuclear weapons and war," he wrote in his commentary on Oppenheimer published by the Tokyo Bar Association.

Still feeling the fallout in Hiroshima

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‘There wasn’t enough about the horror’: Hiroshima survivors react to Oppenheimer

Film about ‘father of the atomic bomb’ finally opens in Japan after being delayed by outrage at ‘Barbenheimer’ memes

I t is hard to think of a more emotionally charged venue than Hatchoza for the first screening in Japan of the Academy Award-winning film Oppenheimer . The cinema in Hiroshima is located less than a kilometre from the hypocentre of the first atomic bombing in history – the devastating culmination of the American physicist’s work.

The film finally premiered in Japan on Friday, more than eight months after it opened in the US, to reviews that ranged from praise for its portrayal of J Robert Oppenheimer – the “father of the atomic bomb” – to criticism that it omitted to show the human misery it caused in Hiroshima and, days later, Nagasaki, in the final days of the Pacific war.

Instead, the film details a haunted Oppenheimer’s struggle to justify Harry Truman’ s decision to use the bomb and, in the then president’s eyes, bring to an end an increasingly costly war against an enemy determined to fight to the death.

“There could have been much more description and depiction of the horror of atomic weapons,” said Takashi Hiraoka, the 96-year-old former mayor of Hiroshima, who attended a special screening earlier this month. “From Hiroshima’s standpoint, there wasn’t enough about the horror of nuclear weapons, but I would encourage people to go and see it.”

Audiences in Japan were forced to wait to see Nolan’s hit biopic, which secured seven Oscars last month, after criticism last year that it had been marketed in a way that trivialised the tragedy . Viral “Barbenheimer” memes sparked an online backlash in Japan, forcing its local distributor, Warner Bros Japan, to apologise.

Many hibakusha , or survivors of the atomic bombings, had hoped the film would at least acknowledge the misery unleashed by the Enola Gay, a US B-29 bomber, after it dropped a 15-kiloton nuclear bomb on Hiroshima on the morning of 6 August 1945. The blast killed between 60,000 and 80,000 people instantly, with the death toll rising to 140,000 by the end of the year. Three days later, the Americans dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, killing 74,000.

Prof Masao Tomonaga, an A-bomb survivor and honorary director of the Japanese Red Cross Nagasaki Atomic Bomb hospital, said he had come away believing Oppenheimer was an “anti-nuclear” film.

“I had thought the film’s lack of images of atomic bomb survivors was a weakness. But in fact, Oppenheimer’s lines in dozens of scenes showed his shock at the reality of the atomic bombing. That was enough for me.”

Tomonaga, 80, who spent his professional life studying the health effects of exposure to radiation from the atomic bombings, added: “The hibakusha are all very old, so this is a film for young people … it’s now up to future generations to decide how to rid the world of nuclear weapons.”

Toshiyuki Mimaki , a co-chair of Hidankyo, a confederation of A-bomb survivor groups, who was three years old when the bomb destroyed his home town, was among the audience in Hiroshima on Friday.

“I was waiting for the Hiroshima bombing scene to appear, but it never did,” said Mimaki, 82. “It’s important to show the full story, including the victims, if we are going to have a future without nuclear weapons.”

There was praise, though, for Nolan and Cillian Murphy, who won the best actor Oscar his portrayal as Oppenheimer, whose moral crisis over his role in developing a weapon that was used on civilian populations loomed large in the film’s climax.

“I’m a fan of Christopher Nolan, so that gave me another reason, along with the venue, to come and see it as soon as it came out,” said Mei Kawashima, a young Hiroshima resident. “When Hiroshima was mentioned in the film, it triggered something in me.

“This was really a film about Oppenheimer the man, and the way he wrestled with his conscience, so in that sense, I think it was right not to broaden it out too much to show the aftermath.”

Shogo Tachiyama, a university student, said he had known very little about the man whose work would result in the destruction of the city where he was born six decades later. “We learned about the bombing and its aftermath at primary school, but I knew nothing about Oppenheimer,” he said.

“I learned a lot from the film, and it’s made me think again about what I and other young people can do … starting from the insistence that nuclear weapons should never be used again.”

This may not be the end of the Oppenheimer story, at least on the big screen. Takashi Yamazaki, the director of the Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One – another film with a strong nuclear theme – suggested in an online discussion with Nolan that the time may be right for an account of the bombings from a Japanese perspective.

To enthusiastic agreement from Nolan, he said: “I feel there needs to [be] an answer from Japan to Oppenheimer. Someday, I would like to make that movie.”

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'Oppenheimer' premieres in Japan. Some Hiroshima survivors, Japanese residents are distressed.

The Oscars'  best picture winner "Oppenheimer"  premiered in Japan on Friday, nearly nine months after its global release, amid concerns about how the country would receive the movie as a victim of the atomic bombing.

Christopher Nolan 's film focuses on physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer ( Cillian Murphy ), who led the race to develop the atomic bomb, although the effects on the people of Japan are not depicted. American atomic bombs  devastated the western city of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the south at the close of World War II, killing more than 200,000 people.

Images on social media showed signs posted at the entrances to some Tokyo theaters, warning that the movie featured images of nuclear tests that could evoke the damage caused by the bombs.

The film was received with mixed reviews from Japanese residents, as well as those in the U.S. who are still suffering from the effects of nuclear bomb testing in Nevada. While some believe the film is a needed cautionary tale about mass destruction, others have felt the film focuses overly on Oppenheimer rather than the victims.

Former Hiroshima mayor criticizes 'Oppenheimer,' some Japanese viewers leave theater in distress

Former Hiroshima Mayor Takashi Hiraoka, who attended an earlier media screening of "Oppenheimer," criticized the absence of humanity for Hiroshima residents. "From Hiroshima’s standpoint, the horror of nuclear weapons was not sufficiently depicted," he told Japanese reporters, according to The Associated Press .

He added: "The film was made in a way to validate the conclusion that the atomic bomb was used to save the lives of Americans."

Hiroshima resident Kawai, who would only give his family name to Reuters, made similar criticism, telling the news agency, "The film also depicts the atomic bomb in a way that seems to praise it, and, as a person with roots in Hiroshima, I found it difficult to watch."

"I'm not sure this is a movie that Japanese people should make a special effort to watch," Kawai concluded.

Yujin Yaguchi, a professor of American studies at the University of Tokyo, told The New York Times the film "celebrates a tiny group of white male scientists who really enjoyed their privilege and their love of political power" rather than giving a voice to victims in Japan and America.

"We should focus more on why such a rather one-sided story of white men continues to attract such attention and adulation in the U.S. and what it says about the current politics and the larger politics of memory in the U.S. (and elsewhere)," Yaguchi added.

Toshiyuki Mimaki, a co-chair of Hidankyo, an atomic bomb survivors group, was left disappointed after leaving the theater, he told The Guardian .

"I was waiting for the Hiroshima bombing scene to appear, but it never did. It’s important to show the full story, including the victims, if we are going to have a future without nuclear weapons," Mimaki said.

Japanese viewers leave 'Oppenheimer' feeling sympathy for the physicist

Speaking to Reuters before the movie opened, atomic bomb survivor Teruko Yahata said she was eager to see it, in hopes that it would re-invigorate the debate over nuclear weapons.

Yahata, now 86, said she felt some empathy for the physicist behind the bomb. That sentiment was echoed by Rishu Kanemoto, a 19-year-old student, who saw the film on Friday.

"Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the atomic bombs were dropped, are certainly the victims," Kanemoto said. "But I think even though the inventor (Oppenheimer) is one of the perpetrators, he's also the victim caught up in the war."

Masao Tomonaga, an atomic bomb survivor and honorary director of the Japanese Red Cross Nagasaki Atomic Bomb hospital, called the lack of survivors a "weakness" in The Guardian. However, "Oppenheimer’s lines in dozens of scenes showed his shock at the reality of the atomic bombing. That was enough for me."

Moviegoer and Nagasaki resident Koichi Takeshita similarly told NPR , "The last look of Oppenheimer in the film was that of pain. It was a look of either regret, because he was the person who made the A-bomb, or he didn't know what to do and was sad, as tens of thousands of people died."

Oppenheimer's nuclear fallout: How his atomic legacy destroyed my world

Shogo Tachiyama, a university student, told The Guardian the movie was good for educational purposes as the full story wasn't taught to him in Japan. "We learned about the bombing and its aftermath at primary school, but I knew nothing about Oppenheimer," he said.

Tachiyama added: "I learned a lot from the film, and it’s made me think again about what I and other young people can do … starting from the insistence that nuclear weapons should never be used again."

New Mexicans, downwind survivors still seeking reparations speak out amid 'Oppenheimer'

During the Cold War,  the United States detonated 928 nuclear bombs in the Nevada desert , many of which were  more powerful than those that decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki .

Oppenheimer’s Trinity test  sent a cloud of fallout over communities downwind of Los Alamos and  into 46 states , according to a new study, catapulting the world into the nuclear age. The Atomic Energy Commission's decision to  ignore , and then  cover up , the danger has left a trail of suffering and death that continues.

Mary Dickson, an author and activist against nuclear weapons, wrote about the effects of Oppenheimer's testing in an op-ed for USA TODAY in August.

"As a child in Salt Lake City, my thyroid absorbed this radiation. Years later,  I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer  and suffered other health complications that left me unable to have children. For others, the poison went into the teeth, bones, liver, lungs, pancreas, breasts, soft tissue and reproductive organs. The damage caused can take decades to manifest as life-threatening illnesses," Dickson wrote.

Open letter: Jane Fonda, 'Oppenheimer' stars ask to 'make nukes history' ahead of Oscars

Mark Shapiro, producer and co-director of the 2023 documentary " Downwind ," also called for more attention to New Mexico residents and others affected by the bombings.,

The film "exposes a tragic, largely forgotten and unforgivable chapter of U.S. history and the ongoing health consequences for Americans and global citizens, addressing the current state of the downwinders, the hopeful expansion of RECA (Radiation Exposure Compensation Act) and the continued tenacity of heroic activists who won't be stopped in their pursuit of government accountability and humanitarian justice," Shapiro wrote in a USA TODAY op-ed in March ahead of big wins for "Oppenheimer" at the Oscars.

Contributing: Mary Dickson and Mark Shapiro, USA TODAY; Irene Wang , Reuters

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‘Oppenheimer’ finally opens in Japan, gaining mixed reviews

"The film was made in a way to validate the conclusion that the atomic bomb was used to save the lives of Americans"

Christopher Nolan ’s Oppenheimer has finally been released in Japan, and the film has been met with mixed reviews.

• READ MORE:   ‘Oppenheimer’ review: Christopher Nolan’s mind-blowing biopic hits like a bomb to the brain

The biopic profiles Robert J. Oppenheimer, played by  Cillian Murphy , the real-life American physicist who played a pivotal role in the creation of the atomic bomb in World War II.

Often dubbed ‘the father of the atomic bomb’, Oppenheimer was instrumental in the creation of the nuclear weapons that were used in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, the only use of nuclear weapons in an armed conflict in human history. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese citizens were killed.

With the film now having been released in the country, the mayor of Hiroshima has been critical, saying (via Associated Press ): “From Hiroshima’s standpoint, the horror of nuclear weapons was not sufficiently depicted. The film was made in a way to validate the conclusion that the atomic bomb was used to save the lives of Americans.”

Many have accused Nolan’s film of being insensitive to Japan and its harrowing past. Spike Lee previously questioned why the movie doesn’t show the impact the atomic bombs had on the Japanese public , with the film focusing solely on the US side of the events.

Another movie-goer told Reuters : “Of course this is an amazing film which deserves to win the Academy Awards. But the film also depicts the atomic bomb in a way that seems to praise it, and, as a person with roots in Hiroshima, I found it difficult to watch.”

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Another viewer, Koichi Takeshita, who lives in Nagasaki, told NPR : “The last look of Oppenheimer in the film was that of pain. It was a look of either regret, because he was the person who made the A-bomb, or he didn’t know what to do and was sad, as tens of thousands of people died.”

It has been estimated that  Nolan made over $85 million (£66 million) for the film .

The director agreed to a deal with Universal after splitting with his long-time studio partners  Warner Bros.  after being one of several industry figures who criticised the studio for their decision to release their  entire slate of 2021 movies  simultaneously in cinemas and on  HBO Max.

Nolan’s deal with Universal sees him earn a 15% cut of Oppenheimer’s “first-dollar gross,” which means he earns a portion of the film’s revenue from the outset, even before the studio recovers its costs.

Oppenheimer   was the biggest winner at this year’s BAFTAs , winning a total of seven, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor for Murphy. It also proved successful at this year’s  Oscars , taking home seven prizes, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor.

In a  five-star review of the the film ,  NME  shared: “Not just the definitive account of the man behind the atom bomb,  Oppenheimer  is a monumental achievement in grown-up filmmaking. For years, Nolan has been perfecting the art of the serious blockbuster – crafting smart, finely-tuned multiplex epics that demand attention; that can’t be watched anywhere other than in a cinema, uninterrupted, without distractions. But this, somehow, feels bigger.”

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'Oppenheimer' finally premieres in Japan to mixed reactions and high emotions

Anthony Kuhn

People walk by a poster to promote the movie Oppenheimer on Friday in Tokyo. Eugene Hoshiko/AP hide caption

People walk by a poster to promote the movie Oppenheimer on Friday in Tokyo.

NAGASAKI, Japan — Eight months after premiering in the United States, the Academy Award-winning movie Oppenheimer opened Friday in Japan.

The film's Japanese distributors never explained why they decided to wait to release the film in Japan. It appears to be due to the sensitive nature of the film's topic in the country where the atomic bombs J. Robert Oppenheimer helped build killed some 200,000 people in August 1945 and led to Japan's surrender in World War II.

In the city of Nagasaki , the second city to be devastated by a nuclear weapon, just three days after Hiroshima, housewife Tsuyuko Iwanai shared her thoughts as she exited the theater.

"The film was only about the side that dropped the A-bomb," she noted. "I wish they had included the side it was dropped on."

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"But then I thought you might think about it differently, if you're in a different position," she added.

Indeed, one of the most controversial points about Oppenheimer is director Christopher Nolan's choice not to directly depict the carnage and agony that the atomic bombs unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but instead to focus on Oppenheimer.

Moviegoer and Nagasaki resident Koichi Takeshita explained how he understood the story by reading Oppenheimer's face.

"The last look of Oppenheimer in the film was that of pain," he observed. "It was a look of either regret, because he was the person who made the A-bomb, or he didn't know what to do and was sad, as tens of thousands of people died."

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Nagasaki residents saw little about their city in the film.

According to American Prometheus , the book on which the movie was based, Oppenheimer said that he generally supported the U.S. government's decision to use nuclear weapons. But he never understood the need to bomb Nagasaki after destroying Hiroshima.

Oppenheimer visited Japan in 1960, but never went to either city.

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Some survivors of the U.S. attacks on Japan have seen the film. Among them is 80-year-old doctor Masao Tomonaga.

Dr. Masao Tomonaga takes the pulse of an atomic bomb survivor at a care home in Nagasaki, Japan. Anthony Kuhn/NPR hide caption

Dr. Masao Tomonaga takes the pulse of an atomic bomb survivor at a care home in Nagasaki, Japan.

He says that at an advance screening of it, he looked at the atomic bomb blast, and saw himself.

"Under that explosion, I was there. I was there, in Nagasaki," he says.

He doesn't remember the blast because he was only 2 years old at the time. His family later explained to him that he survived because his home was about a mile and a half from ground zero. He was asleep in bed when the bomb was dropped.

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'like it or not, we live in oppenheimer's world,' says director christopher nolan.

The blast flattened his house, but he survived unscathed. Seeing the film helped him visualize it.

"I was able for the first time to imagine my situation sleeping on a bed under the 600 meter-high explosion," he says. "So that was my first impression about the movie."

Reuters reported that some cinemas in Japan displayed signs warning moviegoers that the film contains images like nuclear tests that might trigger memories of the bombs.

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Three days a week, Tomonaga cares for atomic bomb survivors at this a home run by the Roman Catholic Church on the outskirts of Nagasaki. He's treated thousands of them, including 700 leukemia patients, which is his specialty.

The average age of the home's 450 residents is in the mid-80s. Being a bomb survivor himself, Tomonaga says he'll eventually move in and spend the rest of his life here.

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Tomonaga says that as a student at University of California, Los Angeles, in the 1980s, he learned the difficulty of trying to change Americans' minds about the use of nuclear weapons in World War II.

"At that time, it was difficult to argue with those who believed that America was right in dropping the atomic bomb," he says. "If I had said this to my fellow doctors, it would destroy the peaceful atmosphere in the lab, so I didn't say it."

Similarly, U.S. citizens would have a hard time convincing Japanese people that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki was necessary and justified, as many in Japan believe that their country was already defeated and on the verge of surrender when the U.S. dropped the bombs.

Back at the theater, the last of the audience trickles out at the end of the film's morning showing on the first day.

Housewife Tsuyuko Iwanai says she doesn't usually go to the movies, but she felt that Oppenheimer was worth seeing.

"I came because things are going on in many places such as Ukraine," she says, "and I feel nuclear weapons are more likely to be used these days."

Chie Kobayashi contributed to this report in Tokyo and Nagasaki.

• Oppenheimer
• atomic bomb
• nuclear bombs
• nuclear weapons